H
oward “Mac” Dashney admits that Michigan was a bit behind other states when it came to cracking down on motorists who illegally pass school buses. Tat was before a female driver overtook a stopped school bus recently and struck two students, breaking several
bones in the process. At least a dozen other students each year, on average, aren’t so lucky. Shortly after the Michigan passing occurred, Dashney, a
long-time pupil transportation consultant for the Michigan As- sociation for Pupil Transportation, was at his local coffee shop when he overheard two elderly couples at the next table discuss- ing the issue. “I was just flabbergasted about just how little they knew about
our stop law. Tat becomes an issue,” he recalls. Well-publicized incidents of illegal passings always seem to
jump-start conversations and even debate about exactly how motorists are supposed to respond to stopped school buses. And that inevitably leads to legislators stepping in and seeking to increase fines and perhaps even seek a law requiring school buses to have cameras trained on the roadway in an effort to document just who is breaking the law. Par for the course, the Michigan state legislature responded in June by introducing a bill to double the fines for motorists if they injure or kill another person as a result of an illegal pass by. Dashney said a result has been a renewed interest by the motoring public on how they are supposed to respond when they come upon a stopped school bus, which is a good thing. But the underlying problem is that newly-licensed drivers are seldom, if ever, required to understand school bus stop laws. And, as demonstrated by Dashney’s coffee shop experience, many older drivers have no clue. Aside from changing how we educate our children, our young
drivers and our older ones, how can school transporters better help law enforcement go after these perpetrators? It’s unrealistic to expect drivers to manage a bus load of
students, keep their eyes on the traffic around them and concen- trate on crossing students either onto or away from the bus. It can also be nearly impossible for drivers to accurately write down the license plate or make and model of an automobile that blows by, though Michigan currently allows school bus drivers to sub- mit reports. But, according to Dashney, often times the courts are hesitant to prosecute the offenders. “Judges have a problem trying to get their hands around, ‘Are
we being too capricious and arbitrary in going after and giving a ticket to this owner?’” Are video cameras trained on other motorists the answer?
Dashney and others like him say yes. Ray Miller is a school bus police officer for the Palm Beach Dis-
trict School Board. Te district recently began installing external Seon cameras on certain school buses on summer school routes to test video quality. Te plan is to eventually capture both the license plate of the passing vehicle and to make a positive iden- tification of the driver. If all goes well, he said the district will expand the number of buses with cameras installed. “Even if we do nothing more than [send] warning letters, we
can capture the public’s attention,” Miller said, adding that the fully uniformed and sworn police department of 200 officers can
also issue citations. “It is a major concern of our school board, and we hear complaints from our bus drivers pretty consistently.” When interviewed in late June, he said there was still little
data to go on, as tape had yet to be downloaded much less viewed. Adjustments were still being made to the cameras themselves, and school bus drivers were just being trained on how the cameras might work, all prep work should the opera- tion ramp up later. Since last December, North Carolina has allowed school dis-
tricts to install external cameras to capture footage that will stand up in court. Tat’s because it’s the only state that requires positive identification of the driver’s face via camera. Examples abound of school districts looking to crack down on illegal passers. And many are turning to cameras to help bring these violators to justice. But the video itself introduces an entirely new set of challenges. Jeff Tsai, director of the pupil transportation group at North
Carolina State’s Institute of Transportation Research and Educa- tion, has been studying the effectiveness of camera technology on identifying illegal passers. “My suggestion to North Carolina is to change the legislation,” he says. “I don’t think the industry is capable of producing a system that is affordable but still able to offer the resolution needed to study the offending driver frame by frame.”
“I don’t think the industry is capable of producing a system that
is affordable but still able to offer the resolution needed to study the offending driver frame by frame.”
• Jeff Tsai Institute of Transportation Research and Education
His research included a test in mid-June that used a high-
definition, 60 frame-per-second camera mounted on a tripod to determine the quality of footage possible. But catching the driver’s face through the windshield proved difficult. “It’s almost impossible for a camera to catch both the license
plate and the driver’s face because of the glares, the angles you have to have,” says Larry Vaughn, president at mobile surveil- lance equipment manufacturer Zen-tinel. “If that doesn’t work, it won’t work on existing products [on
the school bus market] because they’re much lower end,” adds Tsai, who was set to present some of his findings at this summer’s STN EXPO in Reno. Te technology does exist to capture whatever you want it to.
But the problem, as it nearly always seems to be, is cost. Te New York State Police performed an experiment a couple of years ago using a $25,000 camera unit capable of capturing the nec-
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